With a bit of a thaw in the weather this week, events from the last week have produced some grounds for optimism as America moves toward world-changing midterm elections in the fall that, I’m increasingly confident, scores of millions will lean into heavily to make sure will be fair.
It’s not only the stunning turnarounds in special elections in formerly pro-MAGA districts in Texas and Louisiana. It’s not only the national polls showing the current president’s approval rating in the low 30 percent range. It’s not only the next No Kings demonstrations in March that will draw the biggest crowds yet all across the land, or that all these millions carry cell phones that can, and do, record everything that only a few decades ago no one could see.
It’s the recent uplifting cultural developments that stir me the most. Take the examples of the Opening Ceremony for the Olympics now underway in northern Italy and last weekend’s Bad Bunny Superbowl halftime show.
The Olympics ceremony was Italy’s gift to humanity’s fight against the kind of fascism it had to live through for a couple ugly decades a century ago. It focused on the timeless contributions of that great culture to beauty, specifically the beauty of the human voice, of the godlike sound of Andrea Boccelli singing perhaps the greatest paean to hope and heroism in the human repertoire, Giacomo Puccini’s stirring “Nessun Dorma” from his opera, “Turandot.”
Notes posted on the TV screen when he finished, with the added benefit of a full orchestra and chorus, cited a quote from Celine Dion saying, “If God were to sing, he’d sound a lot like Andrea Boccelli.” The same could be said about Dion, herself, in my book, and her epic performance of the great Edith Piaf hit, “Hymne a l’Amour” at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.
Just as Bocelli sang in a foreign (to English) language, so did Bad Bunny, the talented Puerto Rican superstar, during halftime at the Superbowl last weekend, underscoring the fact that MAGA Land is not, as in the fantasy riddled minds of its deluded, racist core components, anywhere even remotely near the center of any portion of the universe worth caring about.
As one blogger remarked about the Superbowl halftime, “A gay woman singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ anti-Trump punk band opening, a Puerto Rican performing the halftime show in Spanish, and the sound defeat of the Patriots by a woman-owned and operated team. 2026 might just be looking up, after all.”
Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, elevated the real America that the MAGAots are seeking to destroy in a beautiful exhibition of love and compassion that was flawless and spellbinding for the scores of millions of the game’s TV viewers who watched around the globe.
As for the game itself, won in unconventional defense-dominated fashion the woman-owned Seattle Seahawks, it exemplified changes in the sport that have arisen from those who’ve called out its terrible brain-damage consequences on its players. As seen last week, players in recent years have resorted more to tacking by means of stand-up group hugging scrums, by contrast to helmets to the knee caps modes of years past, to avert head injuries, or even head contact.
Not surprisingly, one of the game’s new safety measures along these lines, paused kickoffs, drew the ire of the regrettable Trump, watching from Florida, who commented on social media that the measure should be scuttled.
Speaking again of the magnificent “‘Turandot,” Japanese Olympian figure skater Yuma Kagiyama was set to perform his free skate program this week to the opera’s triumphant new, more female-empowered 18-minute conclusion (given that Puccini died before he was able to complete that opera in the 1920s) written by modern composer Christopher Tin and librettist Susan Soon He Stanton. The new ending was commissioned last year by the Washington Opera, which survives even as Trump shut down its Kennedy Center venue this month.
So, you advocates of love and beauty, bear up, fight the good fight, and let’s take back America before the year is out.
